The following interview, conducted in October 2012 by journalist Arash Azizi, was originally published in the Farsi-language journal Mehrnameh, the leading journal of humanities in Iran. In it, John Peterson gives a basic overview of the history of political parties and class interests in the United States, which shows that the U.S. political spectrum has not always been "the same," and that things can and do change, often dramatically.

We are living in a tumultuous period of class struggle, characterized by the political reawakening of previously “apathetic” layers of society, and revolutionary upheaval around the world...Class struggle inevitably leads at a certain stage to open conflict. The role of the police force and the military are to protect private property and profits no matter what the cost, even if the cost is human lives...This is nothing new, and we need to look no further than the 1934 strike of Teamsters Local 574 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

World War I, which began in August 1914, was a catastrophe for the world working class. A result of the rising tensions between the imperialist countries, it ended only when the Bolsheviks took power in Russia and unilaterally pulled out of the carnage, and when mutinous soldiers in the Germany military ushered in the German Revolution.

...The “war to end all wars” had completely transformed the lives of an entire generation of American workers and prepared many of them for future battles—at home...In the first years of the Great Depression, workers found themselves on the defensive, doing all they could just to hold onto their jobs or find new ones. However, by 1932, the first rumblings of struggle had surfaced, beginning with the unemployed.

Texas is typically seen as a one of the most conservative states in the U.S. A “right-to-work” state, it also has one of the lowest unionization rates. But the history of Texas paints a very different, contradictory picture. Texas was not—and is not—immune from the class struggle.

The American Revolution was not a mere “disagreement between well-off gentlemen.” It grew out of the profound economic, social, and political contradictions of the relationship between the British Empire and its thirteen American colonies, contradictions which had accumulated and sharpened over a period of centuries, finally ripening to the point where revolution was the only way to burst through the impasse and allow for the further development of the productive forces, politics, and society generally.